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The Found: Mary Sue

Mary
(sometimes just Sue)
is
fulfillment
underlying all
how exceptional and wonderful
quickly either male
or female

Mary
original
fantasies
may seem to push
her

undisguised
Mary comes
is judged

improbably
the puzzle
Mary
is
a flaw
is an annoyance,
is also apparently not a flaw

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I Think Andy Rooney Has Cloned And Set Down Root

I Think Andy Rooney Has Cloned And Set Down Root In My Psyche, Dreaming Of Poetry

to think deep thoughts
make cosmic projections
–wouldn’t that be nice

to expound on the ground and the weight of the state of it
universalize the wonder of it all
–did you ever notice

to unmeasure time
create worlds from the space between words
–here’s a poem I wrote once

FEATHER

Feathers

all her life, they had been saving down
to make her wedding feather bed

to celebrate the birth,
grandmother killed a goose
and brought the carcase, warm,
to where her daughter lay

a mother makes the first gift

weakly wrenched out of the body
the first feather was bound
inside a square of silk, red,
with wormwood, thyme, and rue

the bundle, smaller than a baby’s fist,
soaked by the fire, in bees’ wax
until the baby had a name

from that day, for a hundred days
they melted crimson wax, dipped
the feather once, and let it harden

honey-scented, it still waited
feather herbs and silk
under bushel bags of down